In recent years, as Japanese competition put pressure on manufacturing businesses everywhere, manufacturers have worked mightily and successfully to educate workers and break down some of the barriers between their upstream activities and the work of the factory. Not surprisingly, manufacturing managers complained that those who defined their work rarely understood it or cared enough about its details, problems, or technical possibilities.įor decades, companies muddled through. Gradually, manufacturing received more and more of its information and instructions through filters-divisions and departments that were separated, functionally and physically, from the production site. Craftsmanship (that is, manufacturing) became separated from downstream activities, like sales and postpurchase service, as well as from upstream activities, like new-product development and design. As a result, work grew increasingly compartmentalized through the division of labor. Mass production overtook customized craftsmanship because customers came to value standardized goods over higher priced, personalized goods. Though he prided himself on being a technician-a manufacturer-his success depended heavily on his willingness and ability to talk with customers at key points: before the sale, so he could get a clear idea of what the client needed and what features would satisfy him during the manufacturing process, so he could incorporate any necessary changes in the product and after delivery, so he could learn what features had worked (and what hadn’t) and what the client needed for maintenance, repair, and replacement. Ībout 200 years ago, when horse-drawn carriages were made largely by craftsmen, the most successful carriage maker was invariably the most accommodating. Today’s flexible factories will become tomorrow’s service factories. Manufacturing, in short, will become the cortex of the business. Production workers and factory managers will be able to forge and sustain new relationships with customers because they will be in direct and continuing contact with them. Moreover, they will make the factory itself the hub of their efforts to get and hold customers-activities that now are located in separate, often distant, parts of the organization. The manufacturers that thrive into the next generation, then, will compete by bundling services with products, anticipating and responding to a truly comprehensive range of customer needs. Who wins and who loses will be determined by how companies play, not simply by the product or process technologies that qualify them to compete. Most products can be quickly and easily imitated and the most automated design and production processes cannot decisively beat the second most automated. Lower costs, higher quality, and greater product variety are like table stakes in poker-the price that companies pay to enter the game. Of course, any competitor can build one too-which is why it is becoming harder and harder to compete on manufacturing excellence alone. That is the factory of the present, which, with money and brains, any manufacturing business can build. The factory of the future is not a place where computers, robots, and flexible machines do the drudge work.
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